Joe Rosenblatt: A Poem



Joe Rosenblatt
OLD AGE IS A TREE WITH DECAYING BARK

Shadows are lurking in the daylight.
Tentacles of my being stir and touch
mottled spirits congealed in a wound.


Old age is a tree with decaying bark
where voices trapped in cellulose
rage at sprouting rootlets in the earth.

 

Among unseen spores adrift in mildewed air
I’d be reborn, nourished by the forest floor:
I could become a child to some spongy mother

 

A hawk-eyed Horus awaits us in these woods.
This bird of the Highest Order is in his roost.
He’s there to snatch my soul and skyward bolt.

 

Shadows are lurking in the daylight.
Elfin spirits stir under decaying leaves.
We serve as food for famished fungi.

 

Or I could be mould on a crooked branch
where woodpeckers drumming for grubs
lay frantic claim to the same living tree.
.
Yellow tailed warblers gossip by a brook
where spores of drifting memory desire
Oyster mushrooms on a soggy tree trunk.



Read my conversation with Joe Rosenblatt here